Interventional cardiologists incorporate a variety of diagnostic tools during catheterization procedures in order to plan, guide, and assess therapies. Fluoroscopy is generally used to perform angiographic imaging of blood vessels. In turn, such blood vessel imaging is used by physicians to diagnose, locate and treat blood vessel disease during interventions such as bypass surgery or stent placement. Intravascular imaging technologies such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) and acoustic technologies such as intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and others are also valuable tools that can be used in lieu of or in combination with fluoroscopy to obtain high-resolution data regarding the condition of the blood vessels for a given subject.
Intravascular optical coherence tomography is a catheter-based imaging modality that uses light to peer into coronary artery walls and generate images thereof for study. Utilizing coherent light, interferometry, and micro-optics, OCT can provide video-rate in-vivo tomography within a diseased vessel with micrometer level resolution. Viewing subsurface structures with high resolution using fiber-optic probes makes OCT especially useful for minimally invasive imaging of internal tissues and organs. This level of detail made possible with OCT allows a clinician to diagnose as well as monitor the progression of coronary artery disease. Angiography is a noninvasive x-ray imaging method that collects data from outside the body during injection of a radio-opaque contrast fluid.
Given the complexity of the various technologies described above and the associated complexity of the datasets each of them generate, co-registering such datasets is difficult. If the relevant systems, such as for example an angiography system and an OCT system, are not calibrated to one another, the likelihood of achieving accurate co-registration is low.
Accordingly, a need therefore exists to provide suitable calibration methods and systems suitable for increasing coregistration accuracy. Embodiments of the disclosure address these challenges and others.